Shampoo · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man on a motorcycle at nine in the morning, going fast between hedges. He's heading to a house he was in yesterday, or one he'll be in tonight. Through László Kovács's long lenses the driveways of Beverly Hills flatten into one continuous zone of green and cream, so the ride never quite registers as travel. George Roundy is the best hairdresser in town, he is always moving, and he arrives nowhere. That's the movie. It takes thirty-six hours: November 4th and 5th, 1968.

Why bring a French philosopher to a picture whose most quoted line is delivered from under a table at a Republican fundraiser? Because the standard account of Shampoo — Wycherley's Country Wife moved to a salon, farce with a sad last reel — explains the jokes and not the tempo. The tempo is the invention. Ashby has farce's entire machinery here: converging paths, near-collisions, the wrong man in the wrong bedroom. He declines to run it at farce speed. Robert C. Jones, who had cut the single-day social crisis of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, holds reactions several beats past the line that provokes them, and in those extra beats something leaks out of the comedy. Deleuze gives us a name for what leaks.

His two cinema books turn on one break. For most of film history the image is an action-image: a person perceives a situation, responds, and the response changes the situation. Perceive, act, new world. It's the circuit that runs the western and the crime picture; American cinema perfected it, and continuity cutting exists to keep it turning. Deleuze's claim is that after the war the circuit went slack. People kept perceiving and lost the ability to answer. He listed five symptoms of that crisis of the action-image, drawn from Italian neorealism and from the American films of the sixties and seventies, Altman above all.

Shampoo has all five, and it has them on a specific date. The situation is dispersive: too many people, loosely attached, none of them the protagonist of the thing they're inside. The party sequences are assembled associatively, dialogue overlapping across the cuts, so the fundraiser plays as an environment rather than a scene. The links are weak; the farce plot's causal chain stays intact but drains, and events collide without consequence. Its shape is the balade, the drive that transforms nothing. The motorcycle rides give the film its only sensation of freedom, and the dossier's phrase for it is exactly right: motion without direction. It runs on clichés it can hear, the Beach Boys wishing they were older so they wouldn't have to wait, played straight over people for whom waiting is the entire problem. And behind the bedroom plot sits another plot, a complot: George wants a bank loan for his own shop. He's refused. By the end it's Lester, the husband he's been cuckolding, offering to bankroll him. The sex farce turns out to have been a story about capital the whole time, and nobody in the frame notices the conversion as it happens.

The most radical stroke is the least showy, and it's Ashby's. Televisions and radios carry the 1968 campaign into every room — Nixon, Agnew, order, respect for law — and no one turns to look. The politics sits at the level of furniture. Deleuze's late term for images that lose their self-evidence and have to be deciphered is the lectosign; its sharpest form is audiovisual disjunction, sound and picture telling two stories that never resolve into one. The election is the country's story. The rooms are these people's. Ashby refuses to weld them, and the refusal has a precise technical form: no reaction shot, ever. In ordinary cinema a TV playing news is what Deleuze calls a mark, an object carrying a habit — see it, expect somebody to turn, expect a face to tell you how to feel. Withhold the turn and the mark becomes a demark, an anomaly that hands the interpreting back to you. You are the only one in the room who hears it. And you hear it from 1975, after the resignation, which is a vantage nobody onscreen will ever get.

Renoir's The Rules of the Game is the ancestor and the debt is exact: the party as social autopsy, masters and servants circulating through connecting doorways, couplings cross-cut until the assembly rather than any single character delivers the verdict on a class about to be swept off. Deleuze reads Renoir through the crystal, his word for an image in which a thing and its reflection stop being separable, and he prizes Renoir's crystal for having a crack, a flaw somebody can escape through. Shampoo takes the party and seals the crack. Richard Sylbert's interiors are mirrored to saturation. A hairdresser works facing glass, and these people are perpetually watching themselves being watched, in houses that Anthea Sylbert dresses until each woman's rooms state her price. That's the decomposing crystal: an ordered, moneyed world admiring its own reflection while it rots from inside, at a fundraiser that doubles as a marketplace, for a candidate who'll be gone in six years.

Against all of that Ashby sets one physical thing. George's hands in hair. The salon is staged as a real workplace with real attention to craft, because his competence is the only part of him that isn't performance. Deleuze would call that posture a gest, an attitude of the body that lays a social relation bare. George's gest is a gift he can't price. It's also what buys his license, since every husband in the picture assumes a hairdresser is no threat. He gives away the one asset he has and can't capitalize the one skill he owns.

Then the last sequence. A hillside above the canyon, a car pulling away, George watching. He can do nothing, and he does nothing. Deleuze's word for a character who has crossed from acting into watching is voyant, the seer — and here it's Beatty, an actor the whole culture understood as an object of desire, playing desirability hollowed out to nothing, without vanity and without apology. The film ends on open air and distance and no use for either.

What it did: it proved a mainstream American comedy could run on a broken circuit and still be one of the year's biggest hits, four months before Jaws shut that window. It took the classical unities — one day, one place, one circle — and used them not to concentrate action but to expose its absence. It also demonstrated a second thing, industrially, that Beatty had learned making Bonnie and Clyde: the star as producer-author, which is why the film's authorship among Towne, Beatty and Ashby is now unrecoverable. Forward, the loose ends are everywhere. Linklater's Dazed and Confused takes the one-day-in-a-doomed-year structure. Paul Thomas Anderson takes the whole territory, in Boogie Nights, Inherent Vice, Licorice Pizza: the Southern California demimonde, the wall-to-wall licensed record, the ensemble in which plot behaves like weather. Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood works the same 1969 unease.

The film reserves its judgment almost entirely for George, and not for the sleeping around, which it treats as unremarkable, but for the missing self behind it. What it leaves open is whether that absence is his failing or the going rate in a place where surface isn't a mask over substance but the substance itself, photographed so beautifully you'd rather not leave either. Watch it again and pay attention to the televisions. Not to what they're saying. To who doesn't turn.